The Savoy. It’s a typical September afternoon in London — cold, windy, overcast — and I’m spinning my way through the revolving door that marks the entrance to perhaps the world’s most famous hotel, accompanied by a conga of international rich folk returning from a hard day’s shopping. They are carrying elegant packages wrapped at Fortnum’s or Boodles or Harrods. I’m carrying a printout of the catalogue for the Monet and London exhibition that is coming to the Courtauld Gallery.
In art there is no saying that advises “follow the Monet”, but there really should be. The grand master of impressionism has become one of art’s most bankable names. His work sells for multiple millions. People queue round the block for tickets to his displays. The revolutionary who changed art has been replaced by a luxury presence that feels as if it too should come wrapped in packaging from Fortnum’s or Boodles or Harrods. It’s an image the Courtauld show is hoping to dispel. That’s where the Savoy comes in.
Between September 1899 and March 1901 Monet spent a total of six months in London, staying at its poshest hotel. He was alone at the Savoy, but not in the capital. His impressionist buddy Pissarro was also a regular visitor and Van Gogh lived for a year in Brixton. Toulouse-Lautrec, meanwhile, kept returning for the food. His favourite restaurant was Sweetings in the City, where his favourite dish was skate in blackened butter. The restaurant is still there. It still serves the skate.
Monet made three separate visits, accompanied intermittently by his wife and children — his son Michel was studying English at a London language school — churning out paintings of the view from his window. And I mean churning out.
He produced hundreds of them, a towering stack of daily updates recording his ceaseless battle with the elements. Later he destroyed three quarters of these Savoy views: they failed his rigorous quality test. That left him with 90 paintings. By the time he put them on show, officially, at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1904, he had whittled it down to 37 London views. Of which 19 will be at the Courtauld.
The exhibition is actually the fulfilment of a Monet dream. From the start he wanted to display his Thames pictures in London and was set to do so, even taking out an advert in The Times in 1905 to announce the event. But at the last minute he cancelled. A fiddler and a perfectionist, Monet was unhappy with his selections and wanted to work on them some more. Three hundred yards up the Strand from the Savoy, the Courtauld Gallery is finally fulfilling his wishes.
All this I know as I click my way across the Savoy’s fabulously marbled foyer to the concierge desk, where an impeccable representative of the communications department awaits me (Note to self: “Should have aimed higher than a saggy anorak, Waldemar!”) Jointly we click our way down some white marble stairs and into a red leather lift that glides noiselessly up to the sixth floor. Down some subfusc corridors we float. And here we are: Monet’s room.
These days it’s a suite, one of the hotel’s most prestigious. So prestigious it doesn’t even have a number. As the door swings open I find myself wishing I had brought my sunglasses. White floor. White walls. White furniture. Huge white marble fireplace. You could hide a polar bear in here and no one would notice.
Even the art on the walls, made by the world’s most prolific artist, the Master of the Hotel Bedroom, is brightly white: a large rectangle of overblown sugar cubes arranged in an abstract grid. I refrain from saying anything to my helpful Savoy guide, but Monet would have hated this snowy suite. All this space and not a drop of colour.
What he would not have hated was the view. When the Savoy opened in 1889, it wasn’t only the poshest hotel in London, but also the one with the best sightings of the Thames. Situated on a fortuitous bend in the river, if you looked right you saw the Houses of Parliament; if you looked left you saw Waterloo Bridge with St Paul’s beyond. It was this spectacular view, and not the spectacular luxury, that attracted Monet.
The entire river frontage of the hotel had cast-iron balconies facing the water. Monet’s painter pal James McNeill Whistler alerted him to the magnificence of the views from these balconies, so Monet took two rooms on the sixth floor and converted them into a workspace. One room was for living in; the other was cleared of furniture and turned into a studio. Both were later absorbed by what is now the Savoy Suite.
The balconies where he set up his easel have long gone. Today you can only open the windows an inch or two. And where the enormous Antarctic Suite has two lofty expanses of bathroom fashioned out of marble and mirrors, Monet had no lavatory. En suite bathrooms were a thing of the future — he had to go across the hall. The rooms cost 7s 6d per day, and 12s for two people. It was the Savoy’s cheapest option.
Why he chose the sixth floor is obvious from the art. The newly opened Savoy had newly useful lifts that could take you high above the city. Monet had been to London before — he first came in 1870 to escape the invading Prussians who had occupied Paris — and had painted the Thames from the recently constructed Embankment. This time he could get above the view and look down on the river from a wondrous new height.
But clarity was not his aim. Monet’s obsession was not the river, but the notorious smog that settled on it daily, misting up its details. In our world the London smog, created by the factories on the south bank pumping smoke into the air and the coal-driven boats chugging backwards and forwards across the Thames, gets a bad press. In Monet’s time pollution and its dangers were not yet fully understood, and the London fog was a thing of wonder.
When his paintings are unveiled at the Courtauld you will see that the notorious “peasoupers” of the capital filled him with awe and delight. The terrifying chemicals pumped into the air by the factories turned the London sky into an artificial aurora borealis, with dizzy swirls of yellow and purple, elusive shadows and indistinct reflections, subtle greens and noisy reds.
“I so love London,” he exclaimed later in his diary. “But I only love London in the winter. It’s nice in the summer with its parks but it’s nothing like it is in the winter with the fog.”
All this the Courtauld will be showing us when Monet’s views of the Thames finally get their London premiere. But what the exhibition will not be delving into is the attraction of the capital for all the other impressionists.
Pissarro’s paintings of Sydenham and Norwood offer fascinating glimpses of the suburban ordinariness he admired. Van Gogh would walk past the Oval every day on his way to his art shop in Covent Garden.
Toulouse-Lautrec, the ultimate Parisian brothel-creeper, made an unexpected poster showing a pair of cyclists testing out a new bicycle chain created by the Simpson factory in Catford. Oh how he enjoyed his visits there.
Somebody needs to put up a plaque reminding us of London’s huge impact on progressive French art. Catford would be the perfect location.
Monet and London is at the Courtauld Gallery, London WC2 from September 27 to January 29, 2025; courtauld.ac.uk
